Editorial. Chile turned a page in its history on December 19. By bringing Gabriel Boric to his presidency, with a large majority that a tight first round won by the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast did not suggest, the Chileans have chosen to turn their backs on a policy deemed responsible for deep inequalities , married with only a few nuances by the majorities of the right and the left who have succeeded in power since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The election of the former student leader from the far left, who will be 36 years old in March, the youngest president in the country’s history, therefore does not only mark a generational leap. His victory fuels in South America, on the left, the hope of a revival that would exceed the borders of Chile in 2022. Crucial elections are scheduled for May in Colombia and later in Brazil. They could lead to the reflux of the hard right embodied by Ivan Duque like that even more extreme of Jair Bolsonaro, whatever the political contortions of the latter.
The partial legislative elections in Argentina in November, however, highlighted the difficulties of center-left Peronist president Alberto Fernandez, whose party was overtaken by the center-right opposition. Latin America also has strongholds of another left, authoritarian, dictatorial, in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, which remains relatively incompatible with the first.
The election of Gabriel Boric, at the end of a ballot marked by a strong participation in the yardstick of Chile, constitutes above all the repudiation of an uninhibited neoliberal economic model, embodied until the caricature by the outgoing president Sebastian Piñera , whose mandate was marred by accusations of business-like behavior. This Chilean “model” has given pride of place to the private sector in the education and health sectors, generating a two-speed society that a funded pension system has frozen a little more.
Social fracture
It has produced indisputable results in terms of gross domestic product growth, but at the cost of a social divide exposed in 2019 by a protest tidal wave. This provided the popular basis for the victory of December 19, sweeping aside the ultra-conservative, security and anti-immigration slogans of José Antonio Kast.
Gabriel Boric, whose family has Croatian roots, showed himself capable of bringing together the different components of the Chilean left behind him by promising that his country would be the “Tomb” of this neoliberalism. He will endeavor to come back to the inequalities which afflict the country by a more equitable, redistributive taxation, and the assumed return of the State, in a word by a program which is inspired, voluntarily or not, of what is already in force, and for a long time, within the European Union.
However, he will have to reckon with a solid right-wing opposition in Parliament. It could force him to make adjustments which the exercise of power is often synonymous with. The new president has already promised dialogue, a necessity as much as an encouraging signal for Chile. This is all the more the case as the start of his mandate will also coincide with a major constitutional revision which could allow both to definitively bury the years of lead suffered by the country and to better take into account the whole. of Chilean minorities.